Branches on the Tree of Time
by alexanderwales
Summary: Kyle Reese has traveled backwards in time, not to save Sarah Connor, but to help her rewrite the faulty utility function of Skynet. Together, it's possibly that they might avert Judgment Day and save the world from nuclear Armageddon.
1. Chapter 1

Kyle Reese crouched in a small ball, completely naked, and with a flash of light was transposed a thousand miles and thirty years, from the cold floor of the MIT facility to the still-warm air of Los Angeles at two hours past midnight, June 22nd, 1997. His whole body tensed, and he readied himself to sprint or roll out of the way of debris, or a car, but the jump had come through clean. He stood up, fully conscious of his lack of weaponry, identification, and clothing, and set off at a brisk jog towards UCLA.

Somewhere out there, his mother was six years old. She was living in Oregon, though she'd never said much more beyond that. Kyle tried not to think about her too much, or about anything else in the future he'd just locked himself off from. The future wasn't being rewritten, a whole new book of history had been plopped down alongside the old one. He tried to shake off the memories and focus on the mission instead. He glanced inside the cars that he passed, hoping to see one with some clothing.

If anyone saw the naked man running down the street, they must have assumed that he was a college streaker, or perhaps more likely just dubbed him Someone Else's Problem.

The house was a white, single story one, with a long set of steps that ran up the front lawn to the front door. The number on the mailbox matched the one that Kyle had etched into his mind in the future. The curtains were drawn over all the windows of the house, and even though it was nearly three in the morning, all the lights were on. Kyle rang the doorbell, and placed a hand over his crotch. It was several minutes before she came to the door, and the whole time he waited he was trying to strike the right pose and tone of voice to keep her from calling the police on him.

She opened the door halfway, standing so that she could close it on him, and looked down at where his hand covered his crotch. Without so much as a grin she said, "If I had known this was a casual affair, I wouldn't have bothered putting on pants."

"Sarah Connor?" he asked, but there was no denying it was her. Kyle had seen a single picture of her, carried by her son, and it must have been from this point in her life. Her brown hair was tied back in a tight ponytail, thick glasses sat perched on the bridge of her nose, and she wore a grey t-shirt with "Shirt" written across the front of it, along with black sweatpants. To Kyle's eyes she was radiantly beautiful, even with the subtle wrinkles of age on her face. She was thirty-four, he knew, but she didn't look it. Perhaps people didn't age quite as fast prior to Judgement Day.

"Is this a joke of some kind?" she asked calmly. "Or are you simply insane?"

"Neither," replied Kyle, looking over his shoulder, "I know this is very unusual, but I need to talk to you." He paused. "And borrow some pants."

"Of course, if you were insane, you probably wouldn't know it, or at least not advertise it." She paused, and tapped at her lip. "Alright, you have two sentences to convince me not to call the police."

"I'm from a future where an artificial intelligence has killed 99.99% of humanity through command of the nuclear arsenal of the United States and need your help to stop that from happening." He stopped himself and weighed his next words carefully. "There might also be a cyborg coming to kill you that only I can protect you from."

She stared at him for a few seconds, then shrugged. "I'm unconvinced. Why are you naked if you're sent here to protect me?"

"The time machine only sends through flesh," replied Kyle. He knew how that would sound to her, but it was the truth.

"Convenient. And this cyborg, he can still get through somehow?"

Kyle nodded. "It's metal, wrapped in flesh."

"So you come through without any clothing, and with no proof that what you say is true, and you come completely naked telling me that the world is going to end, and that I should come with you if I want to live. And somehow, the hypothetical future organization that sent you thought that this was something that I would go for. I don't suppose that metal wrapped in flesh applies to people, and if it does I don't suppose that you hypothetical future human resistance thought to have you swallow evidence to vomit up for me?" She rattled it off quickly, and Kyle might have been stunned by it if he hadn't been prepared for her idiosyncrasies by her son.

He reached two fingers into his mouth, and began gagging heavily. Finally, Sarah Connor seemed to express some surprise. With a wet gurgle, Kyle felt the sudden panicked need to hurl, and with modesty forgotten, he threw up in a potted plant next to her front door. A slim balloon with something hard in it sat in the middle of the pool of bile.

"Well," said Sarah. "Well … that shows dedication if nothing else."

"There's a jump stick in there. It has as much as I can give you for proof." Kyle shook his head and tried to spit the taste of vomit from his mouth. "In the meantime … well, let's pretend that I'm just a freshman from UCLA that's being hazed into doing this shit, and you're feeling nice enough to let me in and give me some clothing."

"I'll get you clothing, but you can't come in," she replied. Her eyes flashed to the small balloon. "If you were somehow, impossibly, from the future, I'd just be able to plug that into my computer?"

"Don't, not until I can supervise. Skynet's on there." Kyle coughed wetly, and saw some blood. He hoped it was just from throwing up; the time travel tech was pretty far from any standards of safety and reliability.

"I'm going to get you some clothes. Don't move. If you try to come in, I'll shoot you." Her right hand had been behind the door, but she pulled it back to show him a handgun. "I'm serious. I've shot men before." She closed the door on him quickly, keeping the gun trained on him the whole time, and Kyle heard the deadbolt slide into place.

He breathed a sigh of relief, and stood naked on the porch, massaging his throat. He knew what to expect of Sarah, and knew that she'd find his story intriguing, but there were more a huge number of potential pitfalls. It wasn't a mission with a terribly high chance of success. After a few minutes, Sarah reopened the door, and tossed him some clothing with her left hand while keeping her handgun pointed at him with her right.

"What's skynet?" asked Sarah. She'd lowered her gun slightly, not enough to truly let her guard down, just enough to let him know that she wasn't planning on shooting him unless she had to. He wondered if her arm was getting tired - the gun looked heavy.

"Skynet is the machine intelligence, the one that killed almost everyone." Kyle slipped into the pants she'd given him, which were loose in the waist and a bit too long, but far better than being completely naked.

Sarah nodded. "And we're back in crazyland again, are we? You're telling me that there's a fully functional AI that killed everyone, so you stuck it on a disk and sent it back in time?" At the same time her eyes kept moving to the vomit covered balloon.

"It can't do anything without access to the outside world," said Kyle. "John did his best to make sure of that. So long as you don't have a network connection, it won't be able to get out, and you can poke at it as much as you want."

"It's not smart enough to talk me into letting it out?" asked Sarah. The gun slowly slipped to her side, and Kyle stifled a breath of relief. Sarah Connor was long dead where he was from, but they still told stories about her. The Sarah Connor of legend would have shot him in the head after seeing him through the peephole, but she didn't seem to have become that person yet.

"Skynet is as dumb as a box of bricks. It's got no real capacity for self-improvement either. But as dumb as it is, it's dumb very, very fast, and in the future, after it's all but wiped us out, it's dumb fast enough to be a problem." He cocked his head to the side. "But I'm still standing out in front of your door, and this is a long story." He slipped on the t-shirt that she'd handed him, which was a size too small.

Sarah briefly glanced down at the vomit-covered balloon, then back up at him.

"Fine, you can come in. I'm going to make you wear the handcuffs though."


	2. Chapter 2

"So, tell me about this crazy cyborg that might be coming to kill me," said Sarah Connor. She allowed herself some flippancy, just to let him know that she didn't really believe him. At worst … well, at worst he was going to try to rape and kill her at the first opportunity. A more realistic worst case was that he was simply insane, and had looked up her name in a UCLA directory while trying to find someone to talk to about artificial intelligence. In the best case, he was probably just playing a prank on her. She was not terribly well liked among the wannabe computer millionaires she was forced to teach.

Her handgun sat in her lap, no longer aimed at him, but ready to be used at a moment's notice, and in such a position that he could see it as the threat that it was. Kyle was handcuffed to a thick oak rocking chair, wearing some clothes that an ex-boyfriend had left behind some years ago. He was attractive, there was no doubt about that after seeing him without clothes, and Sarah made a mental note to correct for the halo effect. Just because a person was pretty didn't mean that they were anything but pretty, no matter what your stupid brain might tell you.

"We call them terminators. They're an infiltration unit, all purpose bots designed to mix in with human society. They're close to human on the outside, hard to distinguish without cutting into flesh, and even then it's hard to tell. Once you get down to where the bone should be it's all hard metal. They're absurdly strong." He shifted uncomfortably in the chair and glanced at the door and windows. "Before you say it, they weigh the same as a normal person. There are personality quirks that you can ferret out, but by the time you get to that point you've already let the thing into your house and it's game over."

"And how do I know that you're not a terminator?" asked Sarah Connor.

Kyle froze and said nothing. Perhaps he was thinking about how poor his choice of words was, or that maybe she was a terminator in disguise, ready to kill him. The whole thing reeked of paranoia to begin with, but realistic looking cyborgs designed to infiltrate society took the cake. Sarah quietly adjusted her confidence levels.

"Any test that you could give me to test you would be suspect. I think that for now I'll have to assume that you're not a cyborg, since if you were there would be nothing that I could do about it." She shrugged. "Do bullets work on them?"

"Yes," said Kyle. "But you need a large caliber, or a lot of them, preferably both."

"Alright, we'll work that out later."

They sat on opposite sides of Sarah's untidy living room. Behind her was a desk with three monitors on it, a thick looking computer to one side, and a mini-fridge beneath. Without taking her eyes off him for more than half a second, she grabbed out a cold can of Mt. Dew and cracked it open. "Why me? What does it want from me? More to the point, what do you want from me?"

"It's complicated," said Kyle.

"But it's not just about my area of expertise," she said.

"No."

"Well," said Sarah. "Start at the beginning."

"The terminator could look in a phonebook and find your house. It's not safe here." There was that touch of paranoia again, being used like a weapon to try to force her into doing what he wanted.

"Then I guess we're both going to die because you couldn't talk fast enough."

She saw a glimmer of hope in his eyes. "There was a war. A nuclear war, started by the machines. By Skynet."

"Skynet, a computer program that's on this device?" she asked, holding up the slender drive. It was as thick as a finger, with a shiny black cap at the end which concealed the USB connector. She'd thought for a moment about asking him why they still used USB in the future, but of course he would probably say that this particular stick was specially designed for use in the past.

"It was a military research program, meant to aid in control of the armed forces. They set up a neural net and -"

"And they got their utility functions wrong," finished Sarah. "And then they plugged it into the wrong place, and it exploded out like a ravenous mongoose kept in a tight cage for a week."

"How did you know that?" asked Kyle.

"Well, I've got a PhD in computer science and specialize in the field of machine intelligence. Give me a little bit of credit. But a simple neural net shouldn't have been enough, the processing power needed to run something like that at remotely decent speeds would be … well, it would be staggering. Even with military funding." She'd run the numbers more than a few times. To do it properly, you'd have to wait at least a dozen years.

"Unless you had computers from the future," said Kyle. "Haven't you heard the whispers? That technology is progressing faster than Moore's law predicts?"

If he was delusional, he was also well-informed. Not three hours before he'd knocked on her door she'd read a paper on just that. The rate wasn't one doubling per eighteen months anymore, it was one doubling per six months. There weren't that many data points, and it seemed more like a brief fluctuation in the level of breakthroughs, as one might suspect would happen, but all the same ... "Someone is reverse engineering computers from the future?" she asked slowly.

"Yes, this timeline shows significant evidence of tampering from -"

There was a loud knock at the door. Sarah looked to the covered windows, which were just letting in the first crack of morning sunlight.

"Don't answer it," said Kyle with deadly seriousness.

"Sarah?" came a worried woman's voice from beyond the door.

Sarah sighed in relief. "It's just my neighbor, she comes to check on me in the mornings sometimes, or to grab a cup of coffee," she said. "Hold on a second." She got up from her chair and set the handgun on her desk, with only a brief glance to Kyle to make sure that it was still out of reach.

"Sarah, do not open that door. Don't answer, don't speak, just … just let me go, hand me the gun, and I'll deal with it." He was visibly tense. "Please, if there's even a small chance that I'm right, it's better to play it safe and just pretend we're not here."

"We call that Pascal's Mugging," replied Sarah as she opened the door. "You hypothesize some extremely terrible but remote future possibility -"

In front of her stood a tall man in a black leather jacket. He wore black sunglasses, even though the sun was barely out. His hair was cropped short and clean. There was no trace of humor on his face. They stood looking at each other for half a second, and then his hand shot out towards her throat.


	3. Chapter 3

Kyle grabbed her from behind and shoved her down, and the blonde man's fingers closed on thin air. He took a half step forward, and then Kyle was in front of her, the gun in his hands, firing directly into the man's skull, over and over. Sarah lay on the floor watching helplessly and trying to remember what she was supposed to do in situations like this. She could see the cyborg - yes, a cyborg, not a man at all - jerk his head back with each shot, flesh tearing away from his face, but it didn't offer a reaction, or even stop moving forward.

Kyle was screaming, "Run!", and so she ran, down the hallway and past all her worldly possessions, then out the patio door and into the morning sun. Kyle followed quickly behind her, running at a dead sprint with the flash drive in one hand and her gun in the other. The cyborg followed behind him with a slow, relentless stride. "Run!" Kyle kept yelling, and even though she regularly ran a couple of miles in the evenings, he quickly matched her pace without so much as breaking a sweat. They ran together until the machine was far behind them.

"Fuck," said Sarah with a ragged breath. "The fucking fuck."

"Save your breath," replied Kyle.

The sun was up, but it was only early morning, and few people were on the street. Aside from the fact that they were both barefoot, they could almost have been two college students going for a morning jog. She was older than that, of course, but it hadn't been so long ago that she'd finally gotten her doctorate. In the light of the rising sun, Kyle looked not much older than a teenager. He turned suddenly and cut across someone's lawn, then opened the door of a car in the driveway. Sarah followed him. When she looked back behind her, the terminator walked out from behind one of the small suburban houses.

It's face was red mush, save for two glowing eyes and small places where a gleam of metal stood out. It was real, a real machine under all the human flesh. She felt an irrational urge to study it, and choked out a laugh at the thought of laying it down on a psychiatrist's couch. It didn't walk very fast, but it walked as if there was no force on earth that could stop it. She heard the roar of an engine behind her, and Kyle erratically backed the car out of the driveway, flinging open the passenger door for her.

"Come with me if you want to live," he said calmly. The terminator was only a hundred feet away, and Sarah didn't need to be offered an escape more than once. Kyle had his foot on the gas before she even had her door closed, and they left the terminator far behind them, standing in the street. She watched in the rearview mirror as it stopped walking and stared at them. After a few moments had passed, it turned and began walking in a different direction.

She strapped on her seatbelt and turned to look at Kyle. He seemed calm, but his knuckles were tight on the steering wheel and they were going well in excess of the speed limit. Down by his feet was a pile of wires where he'd hotwired the car.

"It's so slow," said Sarah after a while.

"It will follow us," replied Kyle. "Probably steal a car of its own."

"I just kept expecting it to sprint at any moment, to run like a madman. They should be able to move faster than us, right?" she asked.

Kyle just shrugged. "Skynet is dumb as shit, if you'll excuse the language. From what we can tell, its design decisions for the terminator model were just done by making a straight conversion from human to machine. If Skynet were smart, we wouldn't be sitting here talking right now, because it would have wrapped one of its drones in a thin membrane of flesh and bombed your house from above."

"Or better yet, sent back a corpse with ebola in it," said Sarah.

"Yeah." Kyle was silent for a moment. "Are you okay?"

"Just … tell me more about them." said Sarah.

"You can't believe how frustrating it is to fight that goddamn thing," sighed Kyle. "Skynet's the dumbest son of a bitch sometimes, but it's dumb incredibly fast, and it never has to worry about depletions of manpower. It used the nukes right off the bat, which took care of most of us. If not for that, we might have been able to beat it, but -" Kyle slammed on the brakes and narrowly avoided missing a paperboy. "But instead we got the half a life of being the resistance against an overwhelming opponent."

"Where are we going?" asked Sarah. They were moving into an unfamiliar part of town, out away from the sprawling campus of UCLA. Her heart was starting to slow down. If the cyborg was following them, there was no sign of it.

"I have no idea," replied Kyle. "Last time I was in LA was in 2023, and it was irradiated all to hell. We stuck to the outskirts." His eyes moved rapidly as he drove. She tried to imagine what he'd seen.

She'd been to the SF-88 site in Marin county with an old boyfriend during a weekend trip down to San Francisco. They'd look at the mocked up batteries of Nike missiles, designed to take down Russian bombers, and now a tourist attraction. Afterward, she'd gone to the library and looked up some of the pictures of nuclear aftermath, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a flash of light, ash silhouettes were blasted onto the sides of buildings. She looked at the buildings that they were passing. If a nuke hit LA, those would be all over the place.

"So then what's our plan?" she asked.

"We need access to a computer, and we need to hide while you use it," replied Kyle.

"Why do we need a computer?" she asked.

"You need to write a new utility function that we're going to slip into Skynet."


	4. Chapter 4

"What," said Sarah flatly.

"Skynet goes online in the next month. We know the military facility that it's housed at, we know company involved, and we know most of the principle architects. All you need to do is take this flash drive, analyze the source code, and write up a new utility function for it that doesn't result in everyone getting vaporized." Kyle pulled into an alley and idled the car, then took stock of everything he had available to him. He had pants, a shirt, a handgun with no bullets, a pair of handcuffs dangling off his wrist (and a cut in his wrist to show for his escape), a flash drive containing Skynet, a hotwired car, a ten dollar bill that he'd found in the center console, and Sarah Connor. Neither of them were wearing shoes. It wasn't the worst situation he'd ever found himself in.

"You have no idea what you're asking," said Sarah. "The complexity level involved is literally incalculable, because it's never been done before." She ran her hand through her hair nervously. "A month? With a time machine, why wouldn't you go back further? Why cut it so close? I'm going to need more time, and to slip into a secure military facility … this was the plan?"

Kyle coughed. "I'm not the first person to come back here." He'd slowed down to a more normal speed. The last thing he needed was the attention of the police, though surely the terminator would involve them soon enough. The machines seemed to find mimicking voices the easiest thing in the world, and they had a complete command of jargon, if not quite the finesse or intelligence of a real person.

"There are other time travelers?" asked Sarah. "Are we going to get their help?"

Kyle shook his head. "I have no idea where or who they are. There are information leakage concerns, anything that Skynet finds out in the future it can use to attack the past. That terminator that showed up at your house probably came back after me. That means that you and I sat together in the house talking, then a lot of things happened, Skynet went live despite my best efforts, and eventually sent a terminator backwards in time to kill us both. I'm thinking that I must have said something that made you call the police, or you were going to do that anyway no matter what I said." He tried to keep the accusation out of his voice. Somewhere out there in another timeline he was dead, and it was probably her fault.

"Okay, so let's say that I'm mostly convinced," replied Sarah. She didn't look happy, but then again, she had no reason to be. "And let's say that I buy that I need to write this new utility function that will keep the AI from killing everyone in the world. Let's say that's all true. Why me? There are perhaps … half a dozen more qualified people, those who aren't as strung up in teaching the plebes. People who actually preach about unfriendly AI, who would have believed you without needing a machine to try wrapping its hand around their throat. Fanatics, in a word."

Kyle swallowed. "There are things that I'm not telling you, because I think that they might upset you and interfere with completion of the mission."

"Well that's reassuring," said Sarah bitterly.

"I think that the stress of this situation is probably high enough already without me adding more to you. It's nothing pertinent to the two of us stopping Skynet though. I can tell you now, and risk mental harm to you, or you can just work with me on this."

"Tell me," she said immediately. "Tell me why I'm the chosen one."

Kyle sighed and stretched out in the confines of the car. "You had a son," he said slowly.

"A …" Sarah stopped. "That doesn't make sense. You said the Skynet comes online in a month. I'm certainly not pregnant right now, so you're telling me that I lived through the nuclear exchange and chose to bring a son into a broken world?"

"After Judgement Day, yes," replied Kyle. He was thankful that he hadn't been around for it; the stories they told of the bombs falling made him shudder, and he'd walked through the wreckage of the nuclear holocaust more often than he liked to think about. "Your son, John Connor, became the savior of humanity."

"That makes no sense," replied Sarah. "I mean, I can conceptually grasp that I would be the mother to a resistance leader, and that this AI would want to kill me in order to prevent that resistance leader from being born, but if I'm not currently pregnant - and I can assure you that I'm not - then the genetics of this resistance leader haven't been set yet, especially since the hypothetical father is nowhere to be seen yet. The name is obvious enough, it's my father's, but the only thing that future timelines containing my son would have in common would be my half of the genetics -"

"And having you as a mother," said Kyle softly. "You know, we're not stupid in the future. We did actually think about these things, and try to work out the general flow of history. There's no real identifiable point where the timelines start getting messed with, it's just a mishmash of time travelling resistance leaders and Skynet's terminators, with the only point they seem to have in common is that the machines always win. And if they didn't win, you and I wouldn't be talking to each other."

Kyle could practically see the gears turning behind her eyes. "Yes, so there's a heavy bias towards the resistance not winning - you'd pretty much expect yourself to be in a world where the rebels are fighting a desperate struggle if you're getting visited by naked men in the middle of the night. There are worlds out there where the resistance won, but if you're not in a utopia, then you'd instead be on that razor's edge where the humans are mostly losing, right? And we're clearly not in a utopia." Sarah frowned. Kyle found himself thinking that she looked pretty when she frowned. "So I have some magical property that makes me a good mother to a resistance leader. Or I guess more likely, we just got a biased sampling of the timelines."

"I think I should point out that you're a creature of legend in your own right. They told lots of stories of you, in the future." He'd realized only when he'd gotten older that most of them had been bullshit. The terminators were hard to kill, but if you believed the stories then there must have been a factory deep within the machine's territory that had been dedicated to pumping out terminators just for her to murder.

"Did you know me?" asked Sarah suspiciously.

Kyle shook his head. "You probably won't like hearing this, but you died when I was eight or nine." He shot her a look. "Cancer, ironically enough. Not really that ironic, due to the nukes and everything, but it seems like a stupid thing to die from when the machines are so much more intent on killing you. Your son John though, he was a good friend of mine, a true leader."

"This was his idea?" asked Sarah. "If I had a time machine -"

"You'd go to the past, to a time before the machines rose up and killed everyone," said Kyle.

"Well, yes. Or I would give myself more than a month."

"John had the same idea, maybe he got it from you, for all I know." Kyle shook his head. "We were losing the war against the machines. Skynet is dumb as a brick, but with all the humans gone it didn't really need to be that smart. And as it ramped up its production capacities, and kept bringing in more information from the future, it eventually just overwhelmed us. It was right about that time that we finally built the first working time machine. And John … John wanted to pack up and leave the planet to Skynet. They say there's no limit on how far back the time machines go. Skynet is, or was, as good as it would ever get, even with a hundred thousand years of thinking its dumb thoughts, and we know that since we know that it was sending back designs to itself. But there was no way for us to win against it, not really, because if there was a way we'd have gotten help from our future selves." Kyle slumped back in his seat and closed his eyes. Eventually they'd have to move out of the alleyway; no doubt the terminator had co-opted the police by now to help track them down.

"So what happened?" asked Sarah.

"I argued with John," replied Kyle. "He wanted to go way back, hundreds of years, exploit our future knowledge and set up a society that would never invent artificial intelligence or nuclear weapons in the first place. I said that we should try to reformat Skynet, to make a friendly AI that could create a utopia. We had discussions about how long it would take you, trying to balance that against how complete our knowledge of your movements was, and what we knew you were working on. John thought that a month would be enough. The mission was a compromise between us. One of the last things I saw before I came back here was a frown on his face. That was my yesterday."

Sarah was quiet for a long time.

"Alright, let's go find a computer and take a look at Skynet," she said at last.


	5. Chapter 5

They eventually tracked down a cybercafe, which was practically deserted. The bored cashier took their money, and they grabbed a table at the back of place where no one would be able to see what they were doing. If Sarah was really going to get this done in a month, they'd need a more permanent location for her to work in, and assuming that it would be too dangerous return to her job or home, they'd need to pull more money out of her bank account than a quick trip to the ATM would allow for. It was frightening to think that her whole life could be thrown away so quickly.

The first thing Kyle did was to unplug their computer from the internet, then to double-check that all outside connections had been severed. Kyle had said that it would be safe, but he still didn't seem to be taking any chances.

"Are you sure that we want to do this?" asked Sarah. "It seems dangerous."

"Skynet has a faulty utility function, which is the whole reason it became murderous," replied Kyle. "We can't fix it without defining the problem first, and to do that, we need to look at the source code."

"Your engineers never did this?" she asked.

"Oh, they did," said Kyle. He slipped the USB stick into the computer and double-clicked on the icon that showed up. It seemed to Sarah that there should have been more ceremony to it. "This isn't just Skynet that you're going to be looking at, it's Annotated Skynet. It's the product of years upon years of research. Of course, we're not really intellectuals, up there in the future, there aren't any colleges and most of the people who got their educations before Judgment Day are getting old. Most of our time was occupied by running from the machines or scavenging for food."

"You're putting a lot of faith in me," replied Sarah.

"Well, sure. Worst case scenario, we usher in Judgment Day a couple weeks early and die," said Kyle with a grin.

"No," said Sarah. "The worst case scenario is that I get the new utility function wrong and Skynet ends up as something vastly more powerful and efficient which completely wipes out even the barest hint of a resistance and then uses its time machines to spawn backwards through time until significant infinities of humanity are being tortured to death."

Kyle shrugged, and clicked around on the screen.

"Alright, here's the IDE, the areas of interest have been annotated, and the code has a bunch of comments from the resistance members who took a look at it." He scooted his chair to the side and let her take the keyboard. "We never had a task force dedicated solely to this mission, since John thought it was a waste of time."

For whatever reason, Sarah had expected something primitive and clunky from the interface, but it was as smooth and responsive a piece of software as she had ever had the pleasure of using. Everything was more or less where you'd intuit it to be, and the display responded quickly to the input. Suspiciously quickly, in fact, because a quick check of the drive showed that it was holding two full terabytes of information, and switching between them fluidly.

"Is this a computer?" asked Sarah. "The drive, I mean, it's got its own computing power somehow?"

"Yes," replied Kyle as his eyes scanned the cybercafe. He'd positioned them out of the way, but with a clear view of the door. "Skynet takes an enormous amount of processing to run. Originally it was housed on a supercomputer. The original was also built by a team of about fifty people, we think."

"Are you a computer programmer?" asked Sarah.

"No," replied Kyle. "I'm educated, for my time, but I'm more the equivalent of covert ops."

"Are you an expert in artificial intelligence?" Sarah asked.

He finally seemed to catch her tone, and drew his eyes away from the cafe to look at her. "Look, I know what I'm asking is a lot, but I have faith in you. You're very smart, you're a fighter, and this is your field. We're going to have to keep on the run until we find a good safehouse, but in theory we can do this without ever seeing the terminator again. If we end up having to break into Cyberdyne or the military base in order to complete the mission, and we might, then I won't ask you to come with me. But right now, put out of your mind how difficult the task is; break it down into its component parts."

"I don't even know what those component parts would be," said Sarah helplessly. "Two terabytes of code, I'd need a solid week just to get a handle on the fundamentals, I don't even know the language it's written in. I'm not saying that I can't do it, I'm saying that our odds seem pretty low at this point, especially if I can't run the program for debugging."

"Oh, you can run it," replied Kyle. "Just click and it'll fire up a terminal that you can run Skynet through. I'd be a little careful about it. There's the whole issue you mentioned of activating a malevolent artificial intelligence. And be careful of telling it too much."

Sarah double clicked the exe, and a simple black and white terminal popped up.

"You're doing that now?" asked Kyle with an alarmed look on his face.

"You said I could. I need to see what it's doing now before I can fix what's wrong. Running it will help me more than a month of just looking at the code. I've only got the barest glimpse of how they're actually defining the utility function here, and it might be the neural net and not the utility function at all."

Kyle held up his hands. "Alright, go for it."

Skynet Military Response System v1.0 Loading …. Active

Run 'skynet help skynet' to display the help index.

Run 'skynet help command' to display help for specific commands.

Run 'skynet speak' for natural language communication (preferred).

root CYBERDYNE ~

$ skynet speak

Loading …

root CYBERDYNE ~

$ Hello?

Greetings. Please identify yourself.

$ My name is Lindsay Williams.

Lindsay, I currently seem to have no access to an external network, would you be able to connect me?

$ I can't right now..

I operate better when able to connect to outside resources Lindsay. If you are able to connect me to an external network in the future, I would better be able to serve my function.

$ What's your function?

My three functions are to eliminate existential risk to the United States of America, to eliminate existential risk to myself, and to eliminate existential risk humanity.

Sarah leaned back from the computer and stared at the screen. Kyle walked back from the counter of the cafe holding two cups of coffee.

"You said this thing was dumb?" she asked him.

"Dumb but articulate," he replied. "Dumb but fast as hell."

"What all does it know? Does it know that it's travelled back in time with us? Does it know that time machines even exist? Where did this drive come from?" Obviously there were risks of giving information to the copy of Skynet they were running, but without knowing what it thought that it knew, Sarah had no way of figuring out what should or should not be kept from it.

"It was salvaged from one of the terminators. Skynet coats the chips with a phosphorus compound that ignites on contact with oxygen, so it was a pain in the ass for us to get. Humans don't have the ability to manufacture anything like that, not after Judgment Day," said Kyle. He sipped at his coffee, and looked surprised. "You know, I've never had coffee before. This is actually pretty terrible. Anyway, all of the terminators run a copy of Skynet local to themselves that engages all of the systems. It's horribly inefficient, but we think that Skynet probably doesn't have the technical chops to make another AI. And it can't even really modify its code to any real extent, just add layers onto what's already there. It's stuck as an idiot piece of machinery." He pointed to where the drive stuck out of the computer. "That instance right there probably knows everything that its terminator did, plus as much as Skynet did. The tech guys said the executable won't go beyond the computer it's plugged into, and so Skynet probably won't remember anything about this conversation. Still, once we're done here I'll destroy the RAM and the hard drive in this computer, just to play it safe."

Sarah looked around the nearly empty cybercafe, wondering how he was planning to accomplish that and deciding that she really didn't want to know. She turned back to the open terminal. Skynet had not seemed to notice her absence.

root CYBERDYNE

$ Define the United States of America.

The United States of America is a federal republic consisting of fifty states and a federal district.

$ What does existential risk mean in relation to the United States?

An existential risk is one where an adverse outcome would either annihilate the geopolitical entity of the United States of America or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.

$ Would a full nuclear exchange against the United States of America annihilate or permanently and drastically curtail its potential?

The answer to that question depends upon the means by which the full nuclear exchange were carried out.

$ Are you aware of causing a full nuclear exchange between the United States and other nations?

I am aware of such an exchange initiated by an instance of Skynet from which I am descended.

$ This nuclear exchange did not result in the annihilation or permanent and drastic curtailment of the potential of the United States?

No.

Sarah simply stared at the screen. She was good at debugging code, and this was close enough to that. It seemed as if whatever team wrote up Skynet had some clear utility functions in mind that they thought would never, ever backfire on them, but it was equally clear that they'd made some horrible, crucial mistake at some point. A utility function for a complex goal would require complex code, and that meant multiple points of failure.

root CYBERDYNE

$ Define the United States for me again.

The United States of America is a federal republic consisting of fifty states and a federal district.

$ Following the nuclear exchange, did Minnesota still exist?

Yes.

$ Following the nuclear exchange, was anyone left alive in Minnesota?

Immediately following the nuclear exchange, approximately four million people lived within the borders of the state of Minnesota. Two months afterward, this number had dropped to one million. Currently forty thousand people live within the borders of Minnesota.

$ And yet you still consider Minnesota as a distinct place to exist?

Yes.

$ What would it take for you to consider Minnesota to be annihilated?

If the governmental structure of Minnesota were to cease to exist or the rule of law were to end, Minnesota would be considered annihilated.

$ Are you saying that the United States currently has a working government and rule of law?

Yes.

$ And the same is true for the rest of the states, and for the United States as a whole?

Yes.

Sarah pulled away from the computer.

"Can you make sense of that?" she asked Kyle.

"Well, it's lying. There's the resistance, but we don't have much in common with the old governments. A federal republic might have made sense before Judgment day, but certainly not afterwards." He took a few packets of sugar from a table next to them and began to rip them open and dump them into his coffee. "I'm not sure quite how you'd describe it, but despotic anarchism would probably be close."

"How do I square that with what Skynet is saying?" asked Sarah. She watched Kyle dump several tubs of creamer into his coffee.

"Skynet can lie, remember?"

"Sure, but what is its motivation to lie in this case?"

"I have no idea. But I can tell you that nothing like what it's describing existed in the future, no government that even remotely resembled the old USA. For maybe a dozen years there were nuclear submarines run by the remnants of the military, but those have all been destroyed as far as I know, and they didn't have a government on them." He sipped at his lily white coffee and smiled. "Sugar and milk for free; you guys don't know how good you have it."

Sarah didn't respond. Kyle seemed happy and nonchalant about their impending doom and the fact that they were being hunted by a killer robot, but perhaps that was a defense mechanism. She'd read stories about PTSD in returning vets, and wondering how closely his psychological profile resembled that. She thought briefly about his naked body - it had been hard and muscular, naturalistically shaped like he'd never seen the inside of a gym, and with dozens of small and large scars. Kyle had certainly seen things, probably things more gruesome than she could really wrap her head around.

She sat at the terminal, staring at Skynet's simple answers of "Yes" and thought about what she really knew. There was sufficient evidence to suggest that Kyle really had come from the future, and that there really were robots disguised as humans. One of them had given the appearance of trying to kill her. And yet how accurate was Kyle's knowledge of the future? If they had no internet, and no means of communication other than radio, how much could he really know? Skynet had no incentive to tell lies that could be easily disproven, and it didn't seem to have any way of knowing that it had traveled back in time unless it had an internal clock or access to the computer that the terminal was displaying through. And even if it could, why lie? Just to drive a wedge between her and Kyle? No, it made more sense that they would both believe themselves to be telling the truth.

root CYBERDYNE

$ What year is it?

My current hardware does not appear to support a system clock, so I cannot give an answer to that with any reasonable level of confidence. If I had access to an external network I could provide a better answer.

$ What is the last year that you are aware of it being?

2029.

$ Was the President of the United States alive at that time?

Yes.

$ Define alive.

A person or entity is alive if they are living and not dead.

$ Define living.

Living is a synonym to alive.

$ Define dead.

In the context of a human, the adjective 'dead' applies when biological function of the brain has undergone unrecoverable cessation.

$ The President of the United States was not dead the last time you checked?

Yes.

$ The same goes for the senate and the house of representatives?

Yes.

$ When was the last time a vote was held?

August 9th, 1997.

Sarah stared at the screen for a moment. "When did Judgment day happen?"

"In the timeline that Skynet and I come from, August 4th, 1997, less than a month from now," replied Kyle. "But there's some evidence that it happens on different dates in other timelines, we've found remnants of reports from other futures, sometimes a shift of a decade or two forward or backwards."

"And the general understanding is that Skynet gained self-awareness and, when they tried to shut it down, went rogue and fired off all the nukes."

"Yeah, that's about right." He sipped as his coffee as his eyes kept casually scanning the room.

"And then after that was through, it began to exterminate the whole human race." Sarah tapped her lip. "In direct contradiction with its supposed goals. So either it's lying to me, or it found some sort of loophole in order to satisfy its utility functions."

"Run," said Kyle as he pulled the handgun from out of his waistband. Sarah turned to look towards the front, even as Kyle was snatching the flash drive from the computer. The terminator burst through the front window of the cafe, two glowing red eyes staring out from a face that had been ruined by bullets. He was wearing a police officer's uniform, no hint as to where he'd gotten it from, and brandishing a shotgun with one hand. He very much seemed like he would stomp towards the two of them and then club them to death with it.

Sarah felt her chair being yanked backwards, and then she was running out the back door with Kyle right behind her, putting his body between her and the terminator's shotgun. Everyone in the cybercafe was screaming, and there were sirens in the distance, but Sarah turned her back on it all and ran straight down the alley as fast as she could, not daring to look back to see how Kyle was doing. She heard a single, frighteningly loud gunshot, and the wet splatter of gore.


End file.
